How to make your API secure?
There are many APIs available on the Internet that you can use for your applications. Anyone can build an API and make it available for everyone. While creating an API is simple, the next thing that comes along with it is securing it.
If your API is vulnerable, the users’ sensitive information will be at risk. The attacks can easily gain access to your network by exploiting vulnerabilities in your APIs. Here are some of the attacks that hackers can use against your API:
- Code injection
- Cross-site scripting
- Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
- Man-in-the-middle
- Credential Stuffing
API Securing Methods
There are various ways through which you can make your APIs more secure against external attacks.
Least Privilege
Any user or entity accessing your API should only be provided the least amount of access to the API to perform their actions. The permissions can be added as needed and revoked when the API is no longer in use.
Authentication And Authorization
Your API needs to have a standard way to authenticate and authorize users to its resources. For this, you should use the OAuth2.0 standard to ensure only authorized users are accessing the data. If you don’t implement it, your API data will be vulnerable.
Rating Limiting
The DDoS attack can bring down your API and, with it, crashes every application that relies on your API. To prevent this, you can implement rate-limiting by setting a threshold above which requests will be rejected.
Validate Input
Always validate the input that the user is sending along with the API. If you don’t, the attackers can send malicious code to the server that can, in turn, crash it.
Fail-Safe
Implement a fail-safe. The user’s default access level to any resource in the system should be denied unless they have been granted a permit explicitly.